A+ Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of artist Dai Chenlian’s solo exhibition “A Bright Moon Surging Upon Tide” on July15th, 2017. With a degree in Oil Painting from China Academy of Art, Dai Chenlian shifted his focus to the creative practices of theatre after graduation. Through the representation of time, language and theatre’s innate quality, Dai queries and reconsiders questions revolving around the creative methods, motives of exhibiting, forms of artwork and so forth.

This exhibition is a new interpretation which follows the same train of thought as Dai Chenlian’s Family Theater Project. The exhibition is named after the famous poem “A Flowery Moonlit Night by the Spring River” by Zhang Ruoxu, a poet from the Tang Dynasty. The artist borrows from the imagery of the poetic verses to construct a space where various art forms, such as performance, painting, text, sound, video and installation interact with one another. With the artist pursuing the historical clues left by a small raft as it drifted across the ocean and finally sought shelter in Shanghai, an invitation is granted to begin detailing and imagining the individual experiences of gallerists. There will be a live performance during the opening on July 15th by Artist Dai Chenlian at A+ Contemporary. The exhibition will be on view through September 3rd.

王凝慧（1983年出生于中国西安）是一名华裔加拿大艺术家，现居美国洛杉矶。她是加拿大多伦多大学计算机科学与国际关系专业理科学士，美国加州艺术学院艺术学士，及美国纽约大学艺术硕士。
Alice Wang (b. 1983, Xi’an) is a Chinese Canadian artist based in Los Angeles. She received her BS in Computer Science and International Relations from the University of Toronto, BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and MFA from New York University.

由加拿大驻上海总领事馆支持
Organized in collaboration with the Consulate General of Canada in Shanghai

“I Do (Not) Want To Be Part Of Your Celebration” is curated by Miao Zijin, taking place at QIAO SPACE and TANK SHANGHAI Project Space from 29th Jun to 27th Aug. 2017.

It is problematic to identify an artist according to his or her age, gender, race or nationality. What the artists participating in this exhibition have in common is that they were born in China and studied abroad in USA, UK, France or Germany, which allows them to have global visions. Whether the artists chose to stay abroad, return to China, or to set up their studios in various places, they are present all over the world. Instead of regarding them as Chinese artists, they are artists from China who work in every possible locale. Therefore, the exhibition no longer deals with dual concepts such as global-local, western-eastern, but emphasizes the dynamics of each artist’s global position.

The floating status dictates that we are likely to follow the artists via screen or the Internet. This allows the artists to often propose the unfamiliar. Liu Xinyi places an electronic temperature and humidity monitor next to each artwork included in the exhibition, in order to detect and compare the temperature and humidity changes surrounding the exhibits, while standing back as an observer. Similarly, Tant Zhong hides her artist’s hand in the invisible interactions between materials. Her recent experiment Shadow Sculpture (2017) shifts the focus from the sculptural to a plane, and reserves fragile contents about to disappear on a stable surface. Aspartime displays a stack of paintings that extract geometric shapes from online image banks, which dilutes the significance of each individual painting and simulates the everyday experience of selecting information from multiple websites opened simultaneously.

Some artists apply personalized methods to construct their own identities. Liu Wa’s Selfie Series（2016-17）is inspired by the popular phenomena of taking selfies to share on social media. The artist adds cultural elements to photographic selfies, and explores the changing roles she plays within society. Pu Yingwei’s autobiography is integrated with his research on archival materials of a historical western figure: Marianne, which renders his own fictionalized identity both nomadic and public.

The limitations of being an artist will also be discussed in the exhibition. Yu Feifei’s As artists. We comment（2017）satirizes the fact that artists may make comments about anything and yet may not make any difference. Zhu Tian’s on-going performance Cling To A Curator（2015-）uses cling film to bind herself to curators she works with, and observes changing power relations between the artist and the curator. He Shaotong’s tutorial video How To Be A Successful Artist（2017）even lists six essential steps that lead an artist to success.

If globalization implies a tendency towards a homogeneous and integrated celebration, the idea of global position stands beside that tendency and traces each artist’s individualized thinking and practice. It also represents issues faced by the artists: being consumed by repetitive exhibition requirements or judged by rigid, pre-existing criteria. When the artists attempt to criticize or solve something, they somehow celebrate the very existence of those issues whilst also generating further problems.

TANK SHANGHAI is designed by OPEN. “I Do (Not) Want To Be Part Of Your Celebration” is co-hosted by Shanghai West Bund Group and QIAO SPACE.

Launched from 2008, Gas Station aims to provide a platform for provoking the potential and imagination of young artists from which sparks, with new energy being continuously input, burst out not only in-between artists also between the gallery and artists. The exhibition Gas Station Ⅸ: dà qǐ dà luò opening on 08 July 2017, will present the new works of Fang Di and Jiū Society.

Fang Di graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2010 and got an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013. He currently works in Shenzhen and Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea). His works convey not only the evolution of urbanization, but also his political attitudes. He is interested in urban practice, references to news, and view himself as a tourist in his videos and multimedia installations. His works use multiple vocabularies to investigate the entanglement in our city life, and reflect on the rapid and chaotic changes that we involved in today’s society.

Jiū Society, Chinese name: 啾. Pinyin: jiū. Meanings: onomatopoetic word, describes the small sounds of animals, whisper. Describes the tiny sounds of insects and birds. On behalf of kiss. Japanese original “ちゅう”, means the sound of kiss, so Jiū is on behalf of “kiss” meaning. Jiū are actually unfamiliar with Li Lei and Han Meimei, and Peter、Ann、Sue and Ken are real good friends of Jiū. They are experimental products of reform and opening-up, and are the heirs of diasporic cultural. In the nonsensical hedonism, except for occasional anxiety and suspicion, Jiū feel great. So they try to sound, an uncertain and tiny sound, “ Jiū”.

dà qǐ dà luò presents a new history of fiction and reconstruction or rather a reorganization period. The “history” here is not a past time, but a static section of the life sample, a story seemingly has a beginning and an end. In the empty nihilistic view of history, making up history is to make a city rising seems to be a fate and finally end here. It’s an undisputed reality that future has become the history. Like the city and society development can’t afford doubt, break off, don’t allow much thinking, just keep the speed, in order to maintain the expectations without any collapse possibilities. Behind the madness, it’s a hypocritical venture capital to the future life.

dà qǐ dà luò is an ever-changing situation with fast-food culture and follow suit in the context of the information age. The artistic expressions and the fictions are collaged together with a crude and fragmented history. The rapid information consumption brought by technological development blurs the boundaries of truth and lies. Everyone in the virtual world lives well and is wrapped with colorful planes and mirrors. Whenever the idea of running away emerges, technology and desire will immediately bribe and retain you, we live in a space where we can’t really leave. The rights and interests corrode the people’s independent thinking. The hand, the originally resistance to the system, has become a props of entertainment. dà qǐ dà luò is a hypocritical revolution.